NowPublic Blog

From The Vancouver Sun:

“Security was swift and iron-clad during the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, but not even a ruthless state lockdown could prevent citizen journalists from making their mark.

Most of the still and video images to emerge from the rioting have been state-approved, but the few cellphone photographs leaking through the security cracks have shown the true brutality of the clashes.

The Tibet story is an especially powerful example of the influence digital photography has literally put into the hands of citizens.

Citizen journalism showed its muscle during the Southeast Asian tsunami in the winter of 2004, when tourists armed with video cameras, digital still cameras and cellphones captured the first images of terrifying tidal waves ripping apart their idyllic vacation spots.

World news was driven and nations mobilized by those amateur images. For mainstream news media, traditionally mistrustful of any material produced by non-professionals, it was a pivotal event.

It’s testament to how citizen journalism has developed that CNN has now expanded its IReport.com, an unedited, unfiltered open house for video and still photography from average citizens.

Before the tsunami, the dramatic, flaming crash in 2000 of the New York-bound Paris Concorde had been captured exclusively by amateurs. After the tsunami, there would be more high-profile news dramas: the London train bombings in 2005 and the Virginia Tech shootings last year, for example. Again, as the chaos unfolded, the news was driven by images taken by people at the scene.

In the words of New York University’s Jay Rosen, one the first to recognize the potential of citizen or “standalone” journalism, the fundamental obstacle that divided mainstream news media and the wannabes and mightbes, has disappeared.

“The tools for media production have been distributed,” he says. “They have left the building.”

CNN’s IReport.com, a YouTube-style site, began in a relatively limited form in August 2006 and since then has received 100,000 news clips.

It’s also testament to the quality and relevance of the submissions that the company’s main Internet site, CNN.com, and its main news cable channel, have used fewer than 10 per cent of the contributions.

However, among that 10 per cent was footage from last April’s Virginia Tech campus shootings - CNN received 420 video clips from students at the school - and 11,000 images from the California wildfires.

“It starts with the audience,” Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, told the media news service MediaWatch. “Audiences are more and more comfortable participating in news.”

It has taken a long time, says Rosen, but citizen-generated video and still photography have effectively become integrated into mainstream media.

“That acceptance (of digital images) was the easiest part,” he said, “because you don’t have to change a great deal about your organizations, you just have to verify who is the person sending it. So, instead of having photos and video generated by Canadian Press or CNN, it comes from a citizen. It’s much the same.”

Leonard Brody, co-founder of the Vancouver-based “crowd-powered” NowPublic.com, dislikes the term citizen journalism, although he’s at a loss for a better term.

“It doesn’t really describe what people are doing,” he says. “Telling someone they’re going to be a citizen journalist is like telling them they’re going to be a citizen dentist.

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